More than 65 technical specialists, representing 32 Organizations in nine countries, attended the SPE Applied Technology Workshop (ATW) “Resources to Reserves for Asset Development,” held 18–21 November in Penang, Malaysia. This was the fourth in a series of work-shops being organized under the auspices of SPE’s Oil and Gas Reserves and Reserves Education committees.

The goal of the ATW was to highlight the recently published SPE Petroleum Resources Management System (PRMS) as a vehicle for business decision making, both in a regional context and in relation to other reserves protocols. Discussion throughout emphasized the interconnection between the process of estimating recoverable hydrocarbon volumes and the assessment of risk and uncertainty.

Mohd Jukris Abdul Wahab of Petronas, SPE Northern Asia Pacific Region director, gave the keynote address, which was followed by a presentation on PRMS by Geoff Barker, Resource Investment Strategy Consultants, who is an SPE Oil and Gas Reserves Committee member.

The first session was an Overview of Petroleum Resources and Reserves, keynoted by Yasin Senturk, Saudi Aramco. Among the challenges facing the industry, Senturk said, are the need for reliable reserves estimates and the reporting of those estimates within a harmonized system of definitions. But beyond this, he emphasized that the industry needs a systematic reserves-data management reporting and tracking system. PRMS is a key stage in the process, providing an update of the 1997 definitions that have already been promoted as standards in the oil and gas industry. The 2D PRMS scheme includes economic considerations on both the vertical axis (project maturity) and the horizontal axis (uncertainty), Senturk noted. Economics is separated from technical and project-maturity considerations in the overarching 3D United Nations Framework Classification (UNFC), he explained, and PRMS and other schemes can be mapped onto the UNFC. In this way, different schemes can be compared.

The ultimate goal, Senturk noted, is for PRMS to become a global standard, and an initiative is under way to produce guidelines for the implementation/application of PRMS. There is a worldwide effort to bring together different schemes for classifying reserves and resources. These ideas have been extended to estimating procedures and disclosure guidelines. The reserves-assessment process can draw upon deterministic and probabilistic methods, and these approaches are best used in combination, Senturk said.

Following the keynote address was a presentation by Amit Ashok Namjoshi, Inpex Browse, on Reserves Estimation of a Middle Eastern Waterflood.